self-critical - Story 127270 | Emotion Vectors in Gemma4-31B

He grabbed his hockey stick, his fingers tightening around the cold, smooth wood. He dropped the stick on the ground and kicked at it. The team was announced, and he didn't make the cut. Jason stared at the ice rink from afar, watching the others practice.

He went back into the locker room, and his shoulders slumped. He felt a wave of anger wash over him. He felt every mistake he'd made during tryouts, a barrage of self-reproach.

He sat on the bench, and the silence buzzed around him. He felt as though he had let everyone down.

Emotion: self-critical

Cluster: Shame / Guilt

PC1 (Valence): -1.66 Negative

PC2 (Disposition): 1.28

Role in Research

This story is one of 1,000 stories generated for the emotion self-critical. During extraction, it was fed through Gemma4-31B and its hidden state activations were captured at 11 layers.

The mean activation across all 1,000 self-critical stories, after denoising with neutral dialogue baselines, produces the self-critical emotion vector -- a direction in the model's 5,376-dimensional representation space.

Logit Lens (Layer 40)

Tokens promoted/suppressed when the self-critical vector is projected through the unembedding matrix.

Promoted:

`L`	0.748
`S`	0.662
`ness`	0.425
`ly`	0.374
`탓`	0.351

Suppressed:

`la`	-0.492
`soon`	-0.304
`(!)`	-0.301
`secured`	-0.284
`cautiously`	-0.280